Blue Jays 6, Red Sox 1: Beckett kills the momentum

BOSTON — Before Friday night’s game, manager Bobby Valentine said he didn’t believe much in momentum. During the game, Josh Beckett showed why.

TIM BRITTON

BOSTON — Before Friday night’s game, manager Bobby Valentine said he didn’t believe much in momentum. During the game, Josh Beckett showed why.

Yes, in baseball as in physics, momentum is represented by the letter P. And in allowing two runs in the first inning and two more in the second, Beckett provided the Q.E.D. to Valentine’s pregame sentiments. Thus, any carryover from Thursday’s walk-off win was quelled in Friday’s frustrating start, ending in a 6-1 loss to the Blue Jays at Fenway Park.

For the third straight start, Beckett was roughed up early. Colby Rasmus began the assault with a one-out triple in the first off a curveball. Will Middlebrooks aggressively fielded Edwin Encarnacion’s grounder and fired home, but home-plate umpire Sam Holbrook ruled Rasmus got his hand under Kelly Shoppach’s shin guards before the tag was applied for the game’s first run. For the 11th time in the last 12 games staged at Fenway, the road team had scored in the first.

The Jays weren’t done. Adam Lind and J.P. Arencibia followed with ground-ball singles, with the second driving home Encarnacion.

If Beckett was a tad unlucky in the first — a close call and a pair of grounders that found holes — he had no such refuge in the second. Yunel Escobar led off with a rocket off the Green Monster in left-center for a double. With Escobar on third, Beckett got a key strikeout of Yan Gomes for the second out. But he walked rookie Anthony Gose after being ahead 0-2, and Rasmus bookended the damage with a double into the left-center gap to score both runners.

“I thought I made two mistakes in the second inning,” said Beckett. “The first inning I made decent pitches. The second inning was the inning where things got away from me.”

Four of the five hits off Beckett in those two innings were on balls about thigh-high. He was missing with nearly all of his pitches: The hits came on a curveball, a changeup, a cutter and two fastballs, respectively.

“He made a couple of bad pitches in the first two innings and gave up four runs,” Valentine said. “I thought he had good stuff all night.”

As in his prior two outings, Beckett rebounded from his earlier struggles to, if nothing else, give the Red Sox some innings. He finished six, allowing one more unearned run. In all, he gave up seven hits and three walks while striking out seven.

Alas, few teams are equipped to withstand the kind of Sour Patch Kids act — first he’s sour, then he’s sweet — that Beckett has employed these last three starts. He has allowed 13 earned runs in his last three trips to the mound, and all of them have come before the third frame.

For the season, Beckett’s ERA in the first two innings is 7.59. It is 3.10 in all subsequent innings.

Boston’s five-run first inning against the Yankees two weeks ago served only to even the score. It worked hard to overcome the three-run hole he dug against the Rays last Sunday to pull out a crucial victory. On Friday, the Sox didn’t have it in them.

With the loss, Beckett fell to 5-8 this season, and his ERA rose to 4.53.

“I can’t say that I’m looking at a whole lot of positives from that outing,” said Beckett. “I got burned whenever I didn’t make pitches.”

The Red Sox, thus, continue to wait on Beckett and Jon Lester to return to form like, well, characters from a certain other Beckett’s drama. The two starters have a combined record of 10-15, and Boston is 13-21 when they take to the mound. They have a collective ERA of 4.67.

Credit for holding down Boston’s bats belongs to Aaron Laffey, who for the second time this season tossed shutout baseball at Fenway Park. The journeyman left-hander blanked the Red Sox over seven innings, allowing eight hits and walking none.

Boston had a total of five at-bats with a runner in scoring position, with three of them coming in the seventh. Laffey won all five battles, stranding runners on the corners in his final inning by getting Jacoby Ellsbury to foul out to third.

Laffey has held the Sox scoreless on 11 hits in 13 innings against them this season.